The Emperor's Combine

Latest darling of the far-out art set is a can mild-mannered Texan named Robert Rauschenberg. His exhibition at Manhattan's Leo Castelli Gallery last week drew admiring crowds, though some gawkers seemed in secret doubt of what they saw. As on another occasion, famed in fable when an emperor paraded in invisible clothes, the atmosphere was both festive and constrained.

Rauschenberg calls his works "combines' because they combine painting with props pasted or fastened to the picture ("It begins with a painting and sort of moves out into the room" He gained notoriety by attaching a pillow to a patchwork quilt, splashing paint over them and calling the result The Bed But such beginning efforts had "a souvenir quality, Rauschenberg says, "which I am now trying to kill. Nostalgia tends to eliminate some of the directness. Immediacy is the only thing you can trust " Among the fragments of immediate experience with which Rauschenberg floods his latest work are stuffed birds, ladder and three radios blaring at once (behind a combine entitled Broadcast)

Biggest and best exhibit was called simply Allegory. It featured an umbrella, and a bar mirror to which had been affixed a cascade of crumpled tin. Bar mirrors are a bore, as filled with eyes sometimes as tapioca and they have a blandly unpleasant way of catching the drinker unawares. The tin in Allegory made a witty tasteful substitute for reflection. Esthetically, the umbrella, too, was a brilliant stroke, its sharply precise form and cloth texture in telling contrast to the gleaming glass and crumpled metal

Born 34 years ago in Port Arthur Kauschenberg supposed "that all painters go to Paris." He made his way there as a student but disliked the talky atmosphere. In 1948 he read a TIME article about Abstractionist Josef Albers' art teaching at Black Mountain College, and hurried home to sit at Albers' feet: "He taught me that there is something to see in anything if you just look." That seems to be the message of Rauschenberg's own art .

He long supported himself by commercial art, but that day is past; the combines created in Rauschenberg's Manhattan loft bring from $400 to $7,500 apiece. Such public demand for such private images is one of the art boom's most fascinating phenomena. Does it reflect a starvation diet of subjective experience amongst the mass of rich Americans? Or do people buy Rauschenberg to share in his quiet protest against what they think cellophane-wrapped sort of world?

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